Commentary: Are youth being influenced by liberal professors?

Here's a premise that many conservative thinkers worry about on a regular basis: Academia is overloaded with liberal professors and researchers who force their left-wing views onto susceptible students. As the New York Times noted the other day, the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Barone had weighed in recently about the "liberal thugocracy" and questioning whether the left was getting its direction from liberals on college campuses.

Not to worry, the Times article suggested. Recent studies from several groups of researchers show that any liberal indoctrination doesn't seem to be taking hold. One professor, A. Lee Fritschler of George Mason University told the Times that if that has been the aim of the academic left, "they've done a pretty bad job."

Fritschler and a co-author of a book on the supposed closed-mind phenomena appear to have reached the same conclusion as that of many parents: you can hardly change the mind of anyone over 15. That certainly mirrors our experience, at least anecdotally.

As Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner put it in their research, "There is no evidence that an instructor's views instigate political change among students," the Times went on.